The Liberal Generation That Knew Not Carter

For a geezer like me it's hard to understand the new generation of liberals and their renewed push for big government.  Haven't they learned the lessons of the liberal failures in the stagflation of the 1970s?  Don't they realize just how the Reagan Revolution turned things around?



Well, actually they haven't; they don't.  Because if you are a chap like Ezra Klein, born 1984, or Markos "Kos" Moulitsas, born 1971, you weren't there.  Klein wasn't even alive!  Nor could they have reached political consciousness in the early 1980s when against all fashionable opinion, the amiable dunce Ronald Reagan turned around the US, economically and culturally, from the existential despair of the late 1970s.



It was in the late 1970s that liberals, having failed to maintain a vibrant economy and culture, reckoned that nobody could do it.  It was a huge embarrassment when Reagan actually did it, and it demoralized a whole generation of liberals.



The truth is that if you cut government spending, cut regulations, and stabilize the credit system, you get big-time economic growth.  That's what Reagan did in the early 1980s.  It took a couple of years for the economy to take off, but when it did...  Well, it shut liberals up for a couple of decades.



But then a new generation came along that knew not Carter and the utter futility of big government politics in the Carter era.  Golly gee-willikins, they began to say, how come we don't have comprehensive national health care yet?



Well, the new generation will find out in due course.  They will discover, as Obamacare grinds the nation to a halt, that the administrative liberal welfare state is a terrible idea, at least as far as comprehensive, centralized, bureaucratic, administrative "affordable" health care is concerned.  Probably the Medicaid problem (where up to 90 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries can't get a doctor) will metastasize across the whole health care system, and liberals will blame the insurance companies.



In Reason today, they are talking about the new crew at The New Republic.  The magazine started out in the 1910s as an unapologetic cheering section for big government.  But in the 1980s it had some second thoughts, as thoughtful liberals realized that something had gone wrong.  The New Republic started to get a bit skeptical of big government.  But now, with Obama and the Kos and Klein generation, it's back to full-throttle big government, and damn the torpedos!



How clueless can you get?



But don't despair.  The fact is that things are already going badly wrong.  The Great Crash of 2008, blamed on greedy bankers, was really a failure of politicians mucking around with the credit system.  The current Federal Reserve money-printing exercise is a full-on admission of political failure, the failure to reduce spending to fit the national revenue.  Atlantic today has a piece on the explosion of the Social Security Disability program, now at $128 billion a year and counting.  Way to go, liberals!  The entitlements are on course to crash in ten years.  Government education is lousy, and government pensions are going to bankrupt the states.



Why Worry!



If President Obama were a Republican the mainstream media would be screaming bloody murder.  But as it is, we will have to wait until the current generation of Democrats hits the wall, and the American people recoil in disgust.



Although Republicans are pretty discouraged right now, things are really not so bad politically.  FDR in the 1930s ran full-speed-ahead for six years before hitting the wall of a 60 seat reversal in the 1938 House midterms.  He won 57% to 40% in 1932 and 61% to 37% in 1936.  Obama, lest we forget, won 53% to 46% in 2008 and 51% to 47% in 2012, losing the House in 2010.  There is a difference!



The facts are that just about everything the Obama adminstration has done economically has hurt the nation's economy, from stimulus to Obamacare to energy regulation to putting off entitlement reform to cranking up the printing press to proposing a higher minimum wage.



But, you say, the American people are clueless on economics.  They don't understand how the Obama Kos Klein generation is hurting them.  That's true.  But the American people do know when it is Time for a Change.  And they will be knowing it good and hard by November 2014 and November 2016.



You can already feel the change in the air.  The fact is that Democrats have been on a forced march for the last 12 years, ever since the insult of Bush's "selection" in 2000.  After the reelection of Obama they reckon it is time to enjoy the fruits of office and relax a little.  They are only human, after all.



But the thing about government is that Government is Force, and for people that support the opposition, the incumbent government is always experienced as unjust.  The longer the incumbents are in power, the angrier they get.  Those are the kind of people who will be turning out in 2014 and 2016.  Liberals may swan around in their liberal bubble, but outside the bubble people are hurting, and pain is what motivates people to get to the polls.



But it is a shame that we have to relearn the lessons of the 1970s.  Because it is always the little people that get hurt.

The Future for Men

The Instawife Dr. Helen Smith asks about the silence of the men.  It's pretty obvious today that the corporate world discriminates against men.

Here's an example from James Taranto today.  Girl at Python (that's a scripting language used in Linux) conference hears two nerds making sexual jokes about big dongles and fork redos behind her.  Complains about it in a tweet.  Guys get fired.

Hey lady!  Yer think you might have spoken to the guys yourself instead of going crying to the teacher and having the little squirts sent to the principal's office?  And boasting about it on your blog?

So what are men doing about it, asks Dr. Helen?

Nothing.  Because they know that in corporate-land they will just get squashed, as "the entire weight of the organization and society come down on the uppity man for questioning a powerful woman."

But there is a solution, and it is the obvious one.  Men, real men, don't belong in big administrative organizations.  Administration is domination.  Big, relational organizations are ideal for women, who are good at managing complicated human relations.

So what do men do?  Isn't this obvious?  Women are lovers, relaters, carers, but men are fighters.

Men have to get out of the big bureaucratic organizations and do something else.  In other words, the future for men is to form startups.

Think about the Taranto-reported episode if all the participants were in a startup firm.

1. The participants would know each other.  So the woman would probably have the balls to tell the guys to knock off the adolescent smuttiness.
   
2. The participants would all be important members of the startup team.  They wouldn't be replaceable cogs in a machine.  So nobody would be getting fired just to make the problem go away.  Instead, the firm's owners would come down on all of the participants: the nerdly men for risking the success of the startup, the woman for not dealing with it on the spot and telling the guys to knock it off.

Needless to say, when you are the startup there is no Human Resources that can fire you.  There's no corporate politics, there is no manipulation of the "system."  There is just the band of brothers (and a sister or two if they can take the heat of battle) all working together trying to win the big one.

Let's get a bit of perspective on this.  Men don't belong in government schools.  They don't belong in government universities.  They don't belong in government bureaucracies.  That stuff is for girls and sissies.  And men probably don't belong in big corporations.  Big corporations are for semi-sissies.

Real men get out on their own and start something new.  That's what fighters do, and real men are fighters.

The great thing about the Internet is that even if you are not a two-fisted fighter you can make your mark.  You can create your own app or website in the basement, and if it hits the spot you can make a fortune, or at least a chunk of change, without actually having to get involved in hand-to-hand combat.  I know, because I did it.

And really, it's about time.  For decades cultural critics have been sneering at the "organization man" the "one-dimensional man" and the like.  Frankly, they have a point.  When you are walled up in a big organization you are living in a kind of plastic Disneyland; you are about as divorced from reality as a liberal reading the New York Times or listening to NPR.  We men are better than that.

Of course, real men don't indulge in sniggering smut within earshot of beautiful women.  And gentlemen don't indulge in sniggering smut within earshot of any woman.  But that is another story.

When the Fed Stops the Music

Why has the Fed been able to print so much money without igniting inflation?  That's what Larry Kudlow is asking today.  The answer is that people are carrying much higher cash balances.

Michael Darda argues that Fed reserve creation and its unemployment target (the 6.5 percent Bernanke-Evans rule) has only partially offset a negative velocity shock of historic proportions...



Economist Scott Grannis... argues that consumers have increased their cash balances and that banks are holding onto extra reserves in order to avoid risk following the financial meltdown. As a result, the M2 money supply has been growing at a fairly steady rate of 6 to 7 percent. Not an excessive pace.

OK.  What does this mean?  It means that that the Fed is eating up the seed corn but people are trying to save seed corn at the same time.



But let's lay out some bullet points to understand what has happened since the Crash of 2008.

• All debt is an anticipation of future income.  The consumer says: I can buy a house now and pay for it out of my improving income stream in the years ahead.  Government says: I can fight this war now, or promise this glorious entitlement now, and pay for it out of the abundant tax revenues that will accrue after we have won the war.
  
  


• A big financial meltdown like 2007-2009 means that the consumer's assumption of future income and the government's assumption of future taxes is over confident.  There will be less income and less taxes than we thought.
  
  
  


• So the right thing to do in 2009 would have been for consumers to deleverage their debt, responding to the fact that they weren't going to get the income they thought.  And the right thing for the government to do would be to cut future spending.  Maybe government keeps going at full for today, but government cuts its promises for the future in e.g. entitlements.  Because there were not going as much tax revenue as we thought.
  
  
  
  


• All this would start after the financial system was stabilized, which occurred at the latest in the summer of 2009.
  
  
  
  


• What has happened is that consumers have deleveraged, but government has not cut spending.  This has worked so far because government has borrowed the money that consumers have saved, increasing its own debt as consumers have decreased theirs.
  
  
  


• So the result is a sluggish economy as consumer savings does not get recycled into good investments in the future but wasteful government transfers in the present.
  
  
  


• If the government had been cutting spending then we would now be looking at a reduced deficit and reducing borrowing and a growing economy, and the Fed could look to stop printing money and to allow interest rates to rise.
  
  
  


• But in fact the government has done nothing to reduce its future promises and instead has piled on a new entitlement with unknown present and future costs.  It is, in essence, doubling down on its bet that there will be plenty of revenue in the future to fund its debt.
  
  
  


• So at some point in the future we Americans will have to consume less.  We can do it with higher taxes or more likely by inflation.  Because there is just less to go around than we thought.  That's what happened to Germany and Austria after World War I.  The nations were much poorer but they kept spending the same.  It took a ruinous hyperinflation to persuade the low-information voters that their government stipends couldn't continue.  Later on they took their revenge on the political establishment by electing a charismatic chap that we have all grown to know and love.

It's possible that no president in 2009, Republican or Democrat, could have summoned the political will to cut back on the promises of future spending.  Certainly Democratic politics is based on the notion that "we are owed" irregardless of the economy.  Republicans, supposedly the Sensible Party, are usually embarrassed to talk about economic reality.  You can see the problem as it is working out in Cyprus.  Given the situation of a banking meltdown the policy of giving bank depositors a haircut is probably the least bad option  from a technical point of view.  But who is going to agree to that, especially after the world has been told that deposit insurance takes care of the bank failure problem for all time?

But sooner or later we will have to go under the yoke.  If we increase taxes to maintain the spending we will be reducing the future potential of the economy by wasting it on government spending.  If we cut spending we will infuriate all the people that say that they contributed to their Social Security and Medicare all their lives and now they want the money sitting in those trust funds.  Ah yes, the Trust Funds.

The Cypriots are raging against the six or ten percent haircut on their bank accounts.  Bully for them.  So now probably Cyprus will have to devalue by 50 percent and go off the Euro.  The same thing will happen with the entitlements.  Democrats will rail against cuts until the government goes broke and their voters are reduced to eating the paint off the walls.

Really, government should spend nothing except on wars.  Then a reasonable revenue could be used to fund and pay off the war debt.  And all the essential social functions of any society would be handled by people in their day-to-day lives instead of by rigid, unaccountable, un-adaptable, unreformable, unaffordable government programs.

What Hispanic Vote?

So now, Michael Barone tells us, Republicans must stop turning off the Hispanic vote by talking like Mitt Romney about "self-deportation."



Well, OK.  But the problem that sticks in the craw of Republicans is that immigration "reform" means making Democratic voters out of people who came to the US illegally.



(I know.  Who worried about legality when the Irish were tumbling out of the "coffin ships" of the mid-19th century?)



The point is that every immigrant group in the last 150 years has started out voting for the Democratic Party because, one way or another, the Democrats were offering "free stuff."  It's natural for immigrants just off the farm to respond to patronage politics and look for a strong patron to protect them with "free stuff" as they learn how to swim in the treacherous currents of the city.



Ever since the Republicans gave up on the tariff--a kind of "free stuff" that appealed to native-born workers--in the debacle of the Great Depression, there has never been a time where Republicans were any good at winning the battle of "free stuff."



So why have the Republicans been able to compete in the political arena?  Two reasons.  Frist there were groups that left the Democrats after they got on their feet and tired of the "free stuff" notion.  Second, there were groups that left when the Democrats started dissing them.  When the Democrat-voting GIs became home owners they stopped needing a powerful patron.  When the Democrats turned against Christianity they lost the enthusiastic Christian vote.



Really, through all this, the Republicans just slogged along being the Sensible Party, worrying about taxes and deficits and the Communist Menace.  If there was a magic moment, when the nation was actually interested in Republican ideas, it was in the late 1970s when the economy went south in a swamp of stagflation, when inflation was 10 percent and unemployment was 10 percent.   And even then it was nip-and-tuck as the Democrats successfully framed Ronald Reagan as a mad bomber and an amiable dunce.



The Republican Party is the party of the People of the Responsible Self.  It is for people that don't think of politics as a way to get their hands on the "free stuff."  It is for people that don't believe in the exploitation theory of history.  It is for people that think like Adam Smith, that the first thing to do is to figure out what you can do for other people.  That it's your job to make yourself useful, and then start to worry about how much money you are getting back.  The Invisible Hand.



The Republican Party is for people that think there is a fundamental harmony of interests.  That all government spending is waste, starting with the Pentagon and the police, but that some things--very few--justify the waste.



There is no point in the Republican Party joining the "free stuff" steeplechase.  Democrats have already got all the best mounts, and they know how to ride them.



The immediate prospect for the Republican Party is not in making nice to Hispanics, who probably have half a century of "free stuff" politics left in them.  The immediate prospect for Republicans is white middle-class voters that are feeling sadder and wiser after the Obama debacle.  We will see the first signs of spring, if there is to be a spring, in the Fall of 2014 after a year of Obamacare.  How's that "free stuff" healthcare turning out, voters?  There eventually could be a wave of women disillusioned with a world without marriage, recoiling from the illusion of life as a career in some stupid bureaucracy to discover life as a social human being in a neighborhood community, bearing and raising children and creating the future.



Really, the politics of the Republican Party is an impossible dream, that politics should not be the politics of the armed band marching around in search of booty, but an attempt to create the good society, by inculcating a culture of cooperation and responsibility, backed up, at the limit, by limited and necessary force.



The chief barrier to the impossible dream is not ordinary people and their appetite for "free stuff" but liberals.



It is liberals that think they deserve government grants  to fund their hobbies.  It is liberals that think they should have the right to sit for decades as tenured professors in government universities on the public dime.  It is liberals that think they have a right to taxpayers' money to fund "the arts."  It is liberals that think they have a right to six-figure salaries and bullet-proof pensions in state government because they care about the poor and the marginalized.



There used to be a word for people like this.  They used to call them "hypocrites."

Forget Woe Is Me, Conservatives!

Conservatives still seem to be in the post-election cringe.  Now comes the RNC autopsy, courtesy of Reince Priebus, about how Republicans should do outreach to women and minorities.

Oh and by the way, lose the idea that the Republican Party is the party of big business.  Really.  How could Republicans have ever allowed Democrats to get away with this?

The Democratic Party is the party of Bigs: Big Government, Big Labor, Big Business, Big Philanthropy, Big Education, Big Media.  Where in the world does anyone get the idea that the Republican Party or the conservative movement have anything to do with the modern Bigs?

Then there is Michael Walsh, who wants to fight on in the trenches and never surrender.

Look.  Let's lose the small-ball emphasis on tactics.  In the Franco-Prussian War the Prussians often got into trouble because their over-eager formation leaders got into tactical trouble--and the French chassepot rifles were better than the Prussian needle guns.  But the Prussians won because they got their strategy right.  Their armies were in the right place at the right time and the French armies were not.

But let us get ever further back, above strategy, above grand strategy.  How about the Grand Vision of what modern conservatism is all about?

Modern conservatism is merely the modern version of the Great Transition from agricultural life to city life that has convulsed the human world in the last three thousand years.  Let us stipulate that the transition was driven by a slow but progressive improvement in agricultural techniques so that fewer and fewer people were needed to grow food on the land.  Instead people could move to the city and make things.

As this Great Transition got started it shared the stage with a revolution in religion, what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age when all the modern religions got started: Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam.  These religions, according to Robert Bellah, all embraced in some way the idea of the Responsible Self.  Humans were not just the playthings of the gods like they were in the Iliad.  All of a sudden individuals were responsible to God for their individual conduct, and to fail God was a damning sin.

It started with the rich bitches at the top of society, your Confucian sages, your Prince Gautamas, your fancy-pants Brahmins, and then gradually worked its way down to the rising bourgeoisie of the Reformation and the mechanics of Methodism.  Now it is engaging the latest wave of people arriving in the city: the former African slaves and the former peons of Latin America.  Not to mention the hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants, moving into the city at the rate of about ten million per year.

There is a profound difference between life in the country and life in the city.  In the country, you are planted, like a tree.  You must make the most of what the weather, the landed warriors, and the vagaries of food production hand out: What you see is what you get.  But in the city you are forever moving, like a fish that must keep oxygen filtering through its gills.  In the city you can never stop.  You must always adjust your life to the command of the market and the price system.

You can see that our life as social human beings in the city is profoundly different than our life as social human beings in the countryside.

Out in the country, you keep the market at arm's length.  Sure, you buy and sell, but only occasionally.  The real business of life is growing the food and passing on the land to an heir.  In the city, every moment of life is engaged with the market.  You cannot repose on your land, because there is no land.  You cannot work at the same livelihood all your life because the market will change the terms of trade.  You cannot retire on your savings, because a war might come along and reduce the value of money.  You cannot check out, as you could do when planted on the land.  You must always be "on," always interacting with the market, always acting like a Responsible Self.

It is the frightful change from planted life to swimming life that so traumatizes the migrants from country to city.  But the migrants always found ways of dealing with it: with churches to learn the ways of the Responsible Self, with labor unions to try to stave off the worst swings of the market for labor, with fraternal associations to create an artificial community of brothers in a world where blood brothers could be scattered to the four corners of the earth.

Enter liberals.  Liberals don't like the culture of the Responsible Self; they are above all that.  They are people of the creative self, the Romantic self, the repressed self, the transgressive self, the liberated self, and they bridled at the dominance of the people of the Responsible Self.  Pretty soon they discovered a way to make war on the people of the Responsible Self and become the ruling class of the modern era.  They would form a coalition with the people struggling to figure out how to thrive in the city.  They would cater to their fears, and confirm them in their pre-responsible culture.  They would protect them from the nasty employers and the higgling of the market; they would give them pensions, health care, education, and other wonderful free stuff.  And these people of the Marginalized Self would be spared the rigors of the Great Transition from country to city.

Notice also how liberals have waged war on the churches, turned labor unions into organized political pressure groups, and most significantly, utterly demolished the fraternal associations without even noticing what they had done.  Here is what they have done.  They have demolished the authentic social institutions of the People of the Responsible Self to make way for their monuments to the administrative welfare state.

Only something went wrong with the liberal project.  Liberals scorned to build self-regulating systems for pensions, health care, and education, institutions that could run themselves, adapt to changing conditions and learn from their inevitable human mistakes.  They built massive monopoly bureaucracies  to fund their grand ideas out of the revenue of government, and liberals would be needed forever to run them.  Unfortunately--and the science is settled on this--governments are incapable of doing what the price system is doing every moment: fixing mistakes and figuring out new and better ways of doing things.  So the liberal administrative welfare state has been slowly running down.  And in addition the liberals visited a horrible cultural collapse on their political clients, so that now marriage is disappearing among lower-class women and work is disappearing among lower class men.  Today we are facing the reality that governments everywhere that have implemented the administrative welfare state model are approaching bankruptcy.  The administrative welfare state will renege on its promises to its clients, the people of the marginalized self, the people still learning how to thrive in the city.  And how.

While we argue over the deck chairs on the Titanic the iceberg is already slicing through the hull of the unsinkable administrative welfare state.  We, the People of the Responsible Self, must stop all this silly argument over tactics, because there is serious work to be done.  We must redouble our efforts to explain and proselytize our culture, which is the proven way to thrive in the city.  We should not truckle to minorities and women.  We should proselytize our glorious culture of the Responsible Self instead.

And we must now start to draw up the Bill of Indictment against the crimes of progressivism-liberalism, which has visited such mayhem on the lives of the migrants to the city, filling their heads with lies and hate, confirming them in their pre-urban culture when what they needed more than anything was a primer in how to make it in the city.  As we conservatives draft and redraft our Bill of Indictment against the liberal ruling class it will slowly begin to seep into the consciousness of people everywhere that we are dealing not with a minor peccadillo--mistakes were made--but with the Crime of the Ages.  Liberals, in their snobbish disdain for the people of the Responsible Self and in their Satanic appetite for political and cultural power, have visited a murrain of hardship and injustice on those least able to bear it: the latest arrivals in the city.

And really, the situation is so serious that there is not a question of punishment or retribution on liberals for what they have done.  There is no way of making restitution for what liberals have done.  The disaster is already too vast, too unimaginable.  The lives are already wasted; the finances of the nation already ruined; the culture already corroded.

All we ask of liberals, after the collapse and the ruin of their administrative welfare state, is that they join us, the People of the Responsible Self, in the work of rebuilding America with a  good will.

And let us all take a sacred vow right now that we will do what we can to ease the lives of the people that have suffered most at the hands of the administrative welfare state, and help them out of the cultural and economic maelstrom that liberalism has visited upon them.

For the reality of the modern city is quite simple.  You must learn to swim like a fish, always keeping moving, always pointing upstream and always conscious of the tides and currents of the market and the price system.  The way to thrive in the city is simple.  Step One: Think about a way in which you can serve your fellow humans.  Step Two: Do it.  Step Three: Repeat for the rest of your life.

Anyone that tells you different is a liberal.

Rush Limbaugh Gets It

Right now the Republican Party is in one of its quadrennial cringes over its relevance and its outreach to minorities and women.  Republicans need to be more understanding about women's issues, about immigration, and about gay marriage.  But Rush Limbaugh pointed out yesterday that this outreach is a losing proposition. Because liberals will always come up with another issue to make conservatives and Republicans look like unfeeling monsters. Take gay marriage, he suggests.

What is it that's going on?  Well, same-sex marriage, homosexual marriage is just the latest way to portray Republicans as oppressors.  After they get same-sex marriage, it will be on to something else.  They always have to have a cause that is liberation related and it's the Republicans who are the oppressors.

Exactly.  Liberation from oppression is what leftist politics is all about.  It needs two things.  It needs a minority population suffering from oppression and it needs an unfeeling or hostile Republican Party or conservative movement to serve as the oppressors.

And if Republicans and conservatives think they will escape their troubles by conceding on the oppression causes du jour they are mistaken.  Democrats will always come up with a new one.

We need to understand the game.  There are two responses to the existential sorrows of the modern age.  One of them is the idea of freedom to break the chains of ruling class oppression.  It is the idea that responsible individuals, acting in the world, are the antidote to the injustice of government domination.

The other response is the idea of liberation from ruling class oppression.  It is the idea that an avant garde movement can liberate people from their chains and lead them to the Promised Land.  But have you noticed, says Rush, what leftist liberation leads to?

But have you ever noticed all of the left's solutions for more freedom always involve us giving to government more control over our lives.  We always end up expanding government.  We always end up giving up a little freedom in order to be liberated by the left. 

 I like to present the modern predicament as the battle between the People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Marginalized Self.  The Responsible Self is a chap who wants to live in responsible freedom, living free of government compulsion, but doing the right thing for himself and his family, his neighborhood, his city, his country.  The Marginalized Self is someone who is "owed" and oppressed.

You can see that the beauty of the Responsible Self is that it assumes that people can be trusted to do the right thing.  It doesn't require extraordinary government powers to right the wrongs of the world.

But the problems of the Marginalized Self can only be solved by big government.

When Republicans are playing defense on gay marriage, on immigration, on the "war on women" they are in retreat.  To turn things around Republicans need to be playing offense, on guns, on government corruption, on deficits, on taxes, on the war on the unborn, on government bullying from fatty foods to global warming to financial regulation.  In other words, Republicans need to be playing the game of the Responsible Self, not the game of the Marginalized Self.

The great injustice of the modern age is its ruthless discipline.  Your medieval serf, oppressed though he might be, could order his life as he chose.  But today we are all the abject subjects of industrial discipline, bureaucratic discipline, regulatory discipline, and subject to a thousand criminal laws of which we know next to nothing.

If freedom or liberation means anything, it surely must mean freedom and liberation from the whip of the disciplinary overseer, that lashes us to work in our subordinate jobs, that channels and directs us on the street and in the airport, and that taxes and regulates us to a fare thee well.

Maybe the People of the Responsible Self can get together with the People of the Marginalized Self to do something about the ruthless and oppressive discipline to which every person in this modern age is cruelly yoked.

End of the Risk-free Retirement

For about half a century, our ruling class has encouraged the plebs in the idea of "retirement."  The idea is that after a life of work you can retire from daily toil and kick back.  As a right.



Maybe the government would kick in with a pension, as with Social Security.  Or maybe your rich corporate employer would kick in with a defined-benefit pension.  Then there are all those tax-advantaged savings programs like IRAs and 401(k)s.



But the truth is, according to Megan McArdle, is that there is no such thing as a risk-free retirement.  We've seen the corporate pension go the way of the Studebaker.  And now we see that public-employee pensions are in the same mess as corporate pensions of a generation ago.  You get into an economic downturn and suddenly your promises are worth nothing.



McArdle develops a mantra for this problem.  The future is uncertain, she reminds her readers, and you can't make that uncertainty go away.

We shouldn't have been surprised--however much financial planners may boast of reducing risk, it is rare for financial risk to actually disappear.  What we do is move it around, maybe transform it a bit.  But the risk always remains.

You cannot get to age 65 (or whatever), quit work, and say: Now I'mm checking out, so my pension, my Social Security, my savings can take care of me.  The future is uncertain. Period.



Retirement always was something of a fantasy.  It presumably developed out of the idea that a manual worker really is clapped out -- but actually well before age 65 -- and unable to work.  So noble government would propose programs and mandates to take care of the needy and the elderly.



Trouble is that governments are all in the business of looting the world for the benefit of their supporters.  And old people are an obvious source of loot.  So even if you think that everything is hunky-dory, chances are some war, some inflation, some confiscation, some disaster will come along and spoil all your plans.  The government will come and tap your savings like in Cyprus.



Cooler heads are saying that it is time to forget about retirement.  You need to be able to respond to whatever the world throws at you.  Older people like me need, in other words, to be employable and adaptable, just like any other responsible adult.  When you start to decline mentally and or physically so that you cannot take care of yourself then it is time to dip into savings and pensions, and maybe throw yourself on the mercy of your children.



Right now, of course, after a century and a half of Marxism, socialism and progressivism, we have the worst of all worlds.  We have the 47 percent that thinks it is "owed."  And we have numerous special interests with the power to loot the commonwealth.  We built powerful government to help the poor, but most of the time it just helps the ruling class.



Whether or not this is just, it means that the economic relations between worker and employer, between debtor and creditor, between spender and saver, between young and old, are grievously distorted by political meddling and outright looting.  It means that necessary adjustments are very hard to make.  It means that ordinary people will suffer.



Because the future is uncertain.  If you guarantee the future for Bill then it means that you will make the future even more risky for Pete.



And the moment we think that we have figured it all out is the moment that the universe decides to give it to us, good and hard.